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Sardine Dressing for Fish
Pound in a mortar, until perfectly smooth, the yolks of four hard boiled eggs and three sardines, which have been freed of bones, if there were any; add the mixture to any of the thick dressings, like the mayonnaise or the boiled. This dressing is for fish.
A compound dressing rather than a standalone one: the sardine-and-yolk paste is a flavour base folded into a finished mayonnaise or cooked dressing.
- Proportions to start fromFour hard-boiled yolks and three sardines make roughly a third of a cup of paste. The recipe gives no quantity for the base dressing, so add the paste in stages and taste, since sardine brands vary sharply in salt.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor or a stick blender in a narrow jar does the pounding in seconds, but the texture is smoother than the original intends. If you want the slight grain of the old version, mash with a fork and then work it through a sieve.
- SardinesOil-packed sardines are the likeliest reading, though the recipe does not say. If using them, drain well, or the extra oil will thin the mayonnaise and can break it. Skin and backbone come away easily with a thumbnail; the bones are edible but coarse in a smooth paste.
- "The boiled" dressingThis refers to a cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, mustard and milk or cream, thickened over heat like a custard, a familiar alternative to mayonnaise in American cookbooks of the period. Either base works; the boiled one is tarter and less rich.
- Egg whitesThe recipe uses only the yolks. Chop the remaining whites and fold them in at the end, or keep them for a garnish, rather than discarding them.
- Salt and acidBecause both the sardines and the base dressing are already seasoned, hold back on salt until the two are combined. A squeeze of lemon lifts the whole thing and cuts the oiliness of the fish.
- KeepingWith a raw-yolk mayonnaise base and oily fish, this is best treated as short-lived: refrigerate and use within a day.
- ServingGood with cold poached salmon, halibut or a fish salad; the recipe gives no yield, so scale the paste to however much dressing you have made.
Fish salads and cold poached fish were a staple of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table, where a dish cooked in the morning and dressed at noon suited households without reliable refrigeration, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carry long lists of dressings graded by what they were meant to accompany. The sardine here is doing the work that anchovy does in older English cookery: a cheap, heavily salted preserved fish used as a seasoning rather than a centrepiece. Tinned sardines from Brittany and later from Maine are often said to have been among the first canned goods to become genuinely common in American pantries, which is why a book like this can assume a reader has a tin to hand. The mortar-and-pestle instruction is a reminder that the smooth-textured sauces of this period were built by hand, and that "pound until perfectly smooth" represented real labour rather than a passing note.